A call to sensible conservatives who still think the enlightenment was a good idea
Warning: non stock post - just my usual diatribe against people who argue from falsehoods...
I have always admired the Alan Sokal hoax. I thought I was a long way to the left of centre – but then I discovered post modernism. Post modernism was a denial of the enlightenment to the extent that it denied the existence of “physical reality”. In the post modernist dialectic no knowledge was superior to any other except the knowledge that no knowledge was superior to any other. Your lying eyes deceived you as to facts – indeed facts were “socially constructed”. If you are not familiar with the Sokal hoax this is the article which was published – and this is the simultaneous article exposing the hoax. It is VERY funny.
Anyway the post-modernist position is absurd. As Alan Sokal points out anyone who doesn’t believe in physical reality is invited to jump off his New York high-rise apartment balcony.
Now the Sokal hoax had a purpose – which was to try and reground the social sciences in reality. Post Modernism has just about self-destructed. Mission sort of accomplished.
But it is not only the left that departed from reality. One of President Bush’s senior advisors derided his critics for being “reality based”. The putative Republican vice presidential candidate in the last election was off with the fairies on evolution. And the right has had its fair share of climate change deniers – long on rhetoric, short on science.
One of the homes of the climate change deniers in Australia has been Quadrant Magazine – the formerly intelligent home of the literate right. I even used to subscribe. Quadrant has been under the editorial control of Keith Windshuttle – a historian who has made the fairly common transition from doyen of the trenchant left to doyen of the trenchant right. He has made a career of questioning other people’s research and particularly other people’s footnotes. Windshuttle was a personal favourite of our esteemed former Prime Minister (John Howard), and Howard was a favourite of Still-President Bush.
Well Keith Windshuttle has been hoaxed. It was a clever little diatribe on genetic engineering which got him – by a bogus author with a bogus argument and little heed to facts. You can read the hoax here and the exposure here. The hoaxer’s identity is now public too - and her politics and her motives are far too left-of-centre for my taste...
Keith Windshuttle has a few dodgy self-defences – one being that Quadrant is not a science journal – and it should not be incumbent on him to check scientific arguments. In which case why does he publish diatribes on the science of climate change?
The main difference I can see between the Sokal hoax and the Quadrant hoax is that in the Sokal hoax the hoax came from the left – and its goal was to remove the vacuous end of the left so that there can be rational debate. Sokal is an old lefty who even taught physics in Nicaragua. The Quadrant hoax came from the left with the goal of exposing the right as vacuous. (PJ O’Rourke – we need a clever right wing hoaxer!)
This is a chance (another one) for the right to clean up its act – and remove the vacuous elements of the right and improving discourse for everyone. Just as Sokal’s hoax improved the quality of left-leaning debate by discrediting anti-enlightenment stupidity – can the right take up the challenge of cleaning itself up?
In Australia a first step would be to sack Windshuttle from the editor’s position at Quadrant. But who to replace him with? Surely the right in the Western world still contains sufficient quality conservative intellect. Or maybe the Bush/Howard era has shattered too many...
Sensible conservatives who still think the enlightenment was a good idea – your time has come…
Please.